Submit yourself to the Twelve, be faithful, in prayer and in action. Oppose Nu’s agents at every opportunity, as the First Emperor, Chosen of the Twelve, opposed the evil Dragon Demon King, Son of Nu.
—High Priest Lomon, 1256 AK.
–
Future year 0 AK of the imperial calendar, Plains of Twelve Heavens…
Pitch-black fire roared as far as the eye could see. The dark, hungry flames devoured the land, like writhing gaps in reality, and reached up to lick the heavens with a thousand serrated black tongues, belching out clouds of smoke so thick it obscured the sun and turned day into night. Yet, divine light rained relentlessly from high above, lancing down through the smog. Droplets of pure radiance fell in multitude, and the cursed fire hissed and recoiled when they met. Each small strike from the blessed lightfall killed the flames’ ravenous momentum and stilled their crazed anger a little more. They could rage, but they could not win.
The once flat plains had become splintered and pockmarked with craters. Rivers of blood turned the hard ground into a gruesome marsh, and noxious fumes choked the air. The very aether of the world thrummed painfully, flayed raw by the grand and terrible spellwork that had been wrought in this place.
Corpses, charred and deformed, enough to populate a country, piled high into macabre hills—grisly heaps slowly trickling down into bottomless chasms rent towards the entrails of the Earth. The dead were a mixture of humans, elves, dwarves, celestials, demis—all the races of the Radiant Alliance—and their mortal enemies: armoured skeletons and hordes of zombies, motionless and drained of their necromantic energy, ghouls and vampires shrivelled into husks, corrupted elves and dwarves shredded to pieces, twisted wolfmen and all manners of abominations, nightmarish monsters, and horrors of mutated flesh that defied sane description.
At the heart of this hellish scene, the ground dipped into a sinkhole. The giant crater spanned many miles, bereft of cursed fire, heavenly rain, or corpses. All had been blasted away by the forces that clashed here. The two main protagonists of this age’s most destructive conflict faced one another in this eye of the storm: the Hero, Chosen of the Gods, and the Dragon Demon King, the God Killer. The decades-long war between them had brought the continent to ruin. Now, it was coming to an end.
The Chosen Hero had fallen to one knee.
The hallowed Shield of the People was bathed in a dimming solar glow. Once unbowed and undefeated, the paladin now leaned heavily on a fractured greatsword—Mercy, the Holy Blade, forged of divine light, reduced to a shiny, broken cane. His helmet had been lost in battle. Sweat and gore slicked greying golden hair to his scalp. His aged face was bloodied, bruised and swollen, his lips busted, his nose broken, and his left eye viciously gouged out, a jagged wound mangling that side from forehead to chin. His remaining eye, pale citrine, stared numbly ahead as he took laborious, gargling breaths.
Blood and grime crusted his once immaculate armour. The shining alabaster metal had turned dull and fissured. Four huge, vertical claw marks sliced through his breastplate, exposing a mess of torn flesh, crushed bones, and twitching organs. The wounds haemorrhaged like a great waterfall in rhythm with the knight’s heartbeat. By all reason, the man should have been long dead. Yet his lungs still weakly drew breath, as if Death herself would not touch him.
Behind him, four giant lacerations in the ground mirrored his injuries, each as broad, long, and deep as a great lake.
Across the crater, his opponent lay bisected at the waist.
However, even in this state, the colossus far out-bulked the paladin and his armour. The once-man whom people called the Dragon Demon King was like a living mountain, an immense, abominable mass of pulsing, putrid flesh in human shape, bloated with tumorous muscles that coiled and uncoiled underneath a too-thin layer of papery ashen skin— like too-many maggots feasting inside a desiccated cocoon. Dense tattoos snaked across his tearing skin in a tangled, undulating, phantasmal tapestry, grotesque and nauseating as it waved around scattered black scales that burst from his massive body like festering boils. Magic that should have stayed buried still swirled about the broken giant, threatening to flay the mind of any who might get close.
Standing, the titan would have towered over his foe like a grown man loomed over a child. Instead, he lay in pieces in the reddened mud.
The Hero’s final strike had cut through the scales of the beast, sundered the earth and carved a ravine straight to the horizon, where it disappeared out of sight. The chasm’s lowest depths glowed with the eerie amber of death magic, and the space above it quaked achingly from the spell’s aftershocks. This here was a power that transcended the mortal realm and approached that of the gods, a might unseen since the Cataclysm wiped out the Ancients.
Yet the Dragon Demon King still moved. Death had come for him, yet he refused to die.
Like a haunting vision from a nightmare, his upper half crawled away from its severed legs and towards his enemy, leaving behind bits of gangrened entrails and half-congealed purplish blood. Clawed fingers dug deep into the gory mud for purchase. Ruby reptilian eyes gleamed through the soiled curtain of wild raven hair that obscured his face, burning with unhinged hatred for the world and the man before him. A savage snarl peeled back his cracked, blackened lips, and it revealed no human teeth but a clutter of obsidian fangs planted awkwardly in swollen black gums.
“KAYDENNNNN!!”
The titan’s roar thundered over the ruined battlefield. The earth rumbled as if in pain. Even the raging elements seemed to hush down in fear.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
The holy knight, Kayden, shook his head and sighed. “…Seifer. Even at Death’s gates, your fire burns so fierce. Give it a rest, brother. It’s over.” His faint voice still carried effortlessly, as if unaffected by distance. It held no gloat, not even relief. His remaining eye was like a pale golden gemstone, hard and emotionless. “You’ve lost.”
The colossus howled in denial, spitting out phlegm, gore and teeth. “IT IS NOT OVER!!” He dragged his huge, mutilated body a few more inches. “THIS… IS NOT–ugh!” Spasms seized him as he suddenly stiffened and vomited a stream of purple blood.
“It is.” Like funeral bells, Kayden’s words tolled with finality. “It has been for a long time. Look at you, Seifer. You’re falling to pieces.”
“NO!!” Shaking, Seifer raised his head. Black veins as thick as a grown man’s finger bulged along his throat. “NOTHING WILL BE OVER UNTIL I BITE OFF THEIR HEADS!!” He resumed dragging himself forward. “I will have them. And YOU, KAYDEN!! My armies will rise again and ravage all who stand in my way! I will burn EVERYTHING to the ground! I WILL PURGE THIS ROTTEN WORLD IN FLAMES, CONSUME ITS THIEVING KINGS, AND DEVOUR ITS FALSE GODS!!” Insanity was once more encroaching in the Dragon Demon King’s crimson eyes, and something ancient and malevolent seemed to peer from deep within what was once a man.
“You’re mad,” Kayden commented flatly. His numb gaze seemed to fly off to distant memories, gaining a flicker of emotion. “You never knew when to give up. It’s what I used to admire and loathe most about you.” The flicker froze over. “But this has to stop. This… madness has to stop. Seifer! Why can’t you see what you’ve become?!”
“What else?! YOU TOOK ALL OTHER CHOICES FROM ME!!”
“There is always another choice.”
Hatred flared in Seifer’s eyes. “AND YOU’VE MADE YOURS!!”
“I have.”
“YOU–!!” Seifer’s broken body trembled. Black veins exploded through his grey skin, flailing like headless snakes, and purplish blood streamed between his cluttered fangs. “YOU SHOULD HAVE JOINED ME, KAYDEN!! YOU CHOSE THEM!! FECKLESS!! OATHLESS!! TRAITOR!!”
“I did what had to be done,” Kayden said calmly.
“HAHAHAHA!!” the fallen titan laughed. It was a painful, joyless sound. “Father would be soooo proud!!”
Kayden’s ravaged face twitched. His cold eye flickered with an even colder emotion. “Don’t mention–” His lips pinched, his eye closed, and he breathed in slowly, wincing when his splintered ribs pushed into his lungs. After a beat, he glared at Seifer. “Is it not you he’d be proud of?”
“Ah! Wouldn’t that be funny!” The titan spat a mouthful of blood and scorn, but for the first time, a glint of something besides hatred and rage wormed its way onto his monstrous face.
Silence stretched between the two enemy brothers, underscored by the dying flames’ dull roar and the distant hammering of the glowing rain.
The holy knight was the first to break the tension. “I am sorry things came to this.”
“Curse you,” Seifer groaned, but a whisper from him still equalled a grown man’s shouting voice. He tried again to pull his eviscerated torso forward, but his unnatural resilience was finally running out. Agony curled his bestial features, but his red snake eyes were clear as they accused his brother. “How could you, Kayden? Did you forget?! Why sell your soul to them?!” Unbidden, foul black tears as thick as tar dripped down his grey face.
The knight’s eye widened a fraction. “So you can still cry… I thought we had both forgotten how to.” Hesitation, then resolve flashed in his gaze. With a grunt, the Hero forced his broken body to stand, leaning on Mercy for support. His gruesome wounds belched out another stream of blood. He stumbled, but he did not fall.
“What are you mumbling, you old fool?” Seifer growled. “Have you finally gone senile? Or did you sell out your brain along with your honour?!”
Kayden chuckled without humour. “Always that sharp tongue. One thing you never lost.” Though his words seemed aimed at his brother, he appeared lost in his own thoughts. Slowly, he limped forth. Meanwhile, Seifer crawled his way forward at a snail’s pace—as more foul blood dripped between his fangs with each conquered inch.
It was a sad sight, a sobering conclusion to this world-shaking battle of demigods.
The two met at last, two brothers, the Chosen Hero of the Twelve Gods and the Dragon Demon King who hated them. Seifer tried to swipe at his hated enemy, but his inhuman life force failed him in the end. His arm swung limply and flopped to the ground. Seifer screamed, raged, and roared for his limb to move.
It would not.
Kayden collapsed to his knees in front of his younger brother writhing on the ground. “I did not forget,” the knight mumbled faintly, as if trying to convince himself. “I did what had to be done. It was the only way.” Fury ignited in his cold, dead eye, and for a heartbeat, the two did look like siblings once more. But Kayden’s rage was a tight and controlled thing, a sharpened knife to Seifer’s chaotic flail. “I can never… forget,” the words ground out between his clenched teeth. “Nor can I forgive. But that’s in the past. Seifer, can you guess my greatest regret at the moment?”
Seifer only glared back hatefully.
Kayden returned the faintest smile, little more than a pale echo, without any real joy behind it. He raised his left hand. Motes of coloured light started gathering over his palm, equally split between a loud yellow and a soft amber. Glowing runes formed around the lights, corralling them, condensing them, until a miniature sun coalesced above Kayden’s palm—the newborn star trapped inside a cage of frighteningly complex and rapidly shifting glyphs. Even Seifer, who had studied relics of the Ancients, struggled to understand what he was looking at.
Power kept building up within the construct—so much so that the world’s aether seemed to twist and fold around it as the laws of reality were forcibly rewritten. Skin flaked off Kayden’s left hand like burnt paper. The flesh withered and flaked off his phalanxes, and the bones themselves were rapidly cracking and turning to dust. “I guess that’s my limit with this,” he whispered idly.
For the first time since the start of the battle, doubt and even fear wormed past the madness in Seifer’s eyes. “Kayden… what are you–?”
“Seifer,” his brother interrupted, his voice strained. “Let me tell you… my greatest regret… is… I couldn’t save you either.”
“LIAR!!”
Seifer’s insane fury re-ignited with a vengeance. He convulsed on the ground, snarling like a rabid animal and trying to force his dismembered torso up. His repulsive tattoos flared. Black flames erupted from him, consuming his flesh for a last dredge of power, and his skin churned like a tempestuous sea. Muscles swelled and exploded out of his skin, whipping the air like demented tentacles. New fangs grew chaotically out of his mouth, and black scales crawled over his face.
His snake eyes sparked red with hatred, fixed on the holy knight. “YOU DARE–?!?! I’LL KILL YOU!! KAYDEN!! KILL ME NOW, OR I SWEAR I’LL KILL YOU!!”
“You can’t,” Kayden stated simply.
Above his crumbling skeletal hand, the caged aether pulsed brighter with every passing moment, thrumming, quaking to be released, but wrung into obedience by the knight’s indomitable will. Eventually, it became too blinding to look at, even for the two demigods.
A lone tear rolled from Kayden’s remaining eye as he closed it. “Farewell, Brother.”
“KAAAAYYYYDENNNNN!!”
The spell ignited. Light engulfed the wretched battlefield, and a new dawn rose under the blackened sky.
* * * * *